Mary, I think the maximum allowed width of an image here is 1000 pixels so you can safely resize your images to that size with your favorite software and that will speed your upload a lot
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I'd never have guessed that the background was a fence. I was rather convinced it was out of focus trees
. A piece of cardboard would work well, provided there is no shadow cast on it. Some like to take an out of focus background, print it on matte paper and use that as a makeshift studio background, but never tried that myself.
Sorry to hear about your metering problems. It is often more difficult to meter for macros, but two stops still sounds like a lot.
Some thoughts:
Try a different metering method, sometimes one works better than the other.
Is the problem the same, regardless of which lens that is used?
If you can't get to the bottom of this, but the problem is consistent, you could simply dial in exposure compensation in these circumstances. I got the impression that you were using fully manual and you shouldn't need to do that (unless you want to of course).
